Doing Justice to Justice: Competing Frameworks of Interpretation in Christian Social Ethics

By Stephen Grabill

This monograph attempts to unravel the distinct applications of social justice, economic justice, and distributive justice in modern Christian social thought. The purpose is to set up a framework for justice that properly distinguishes each type, and also clarifies the relationships between instances of these types.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acton Institute
• Release date: May 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781880595626

Book preview

Doing Justice to Justice

Stephen J. Grabill

Kevin E. Schmiesing

Gloria L. Zúñiga

Christian Social Thought Series

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Acton Institute

An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

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CONTENTS

Foreword

I. Introduction

II. Rendering to Thomas His Due

III. The Meaning of Economic Justice

Notes

References

About the Authors

FOREWORD

The discipline of economics deserves much more recognition in theological studies than it currently receives. Unemployment, recessions, fiscal policies, and so on, affect the life of every parishioner. It is thus inevitable that clergy called to apostolic ministry and religious leadership is confronted directly with economic issues. Although the media and popular literature have led us to believe that economic issues concern only money, there are myriads of other problems that every one of us encounters that are also economic in nature. It would surprise many to learn that economic activity includes one’s choice of reading material, or one’s choice for food at the grocery store, and there is even an economic dimension to our choice of friends. Economic activity is much broader than what is typically believed, but only economists seem to know this. The Christian Social Thought Series was conceived as the means to help the clergy achieve such understanding.

Toward this end, it is important to position this publication within the range of all possible publications dedicated to any degree to economic issues. On the one hand, the Christian Social Thought Series will not provide the reader with technical economic knowledge. This would not only be a futile goal but, as we shall demonstrate, an unnecessary one. On the other hand, the Christian Social Thought Series is not another newspaper-style review of economic issues. All too often, newspaper articles or editorials skip over any substantive examination of facts in preference for entertainment.

The Christian Social Thought Series is an academic publication. This means that it is written by economists and scholars of other disciplines, such as theology, history, and philosophy, who have a firm grasp of both economic theory and Christian theology. But the essays in the series are not written for economists who have not been exorcised from their proclivities for mathematical terms and specialized language foreign to the layperson. Our aim is for economists to write what they know in plain, ordinary language, without sacrificing the depth and complexity of their economic analyses. It must be clear, too, that the essays in the Christian Social Thought Series are not written only for theologians, although they favor the philosophical rigor that accompanies theological studies. Our inheritance of Aristotelian thought that filtered through the contributions in the Middle Ages, for example, as well as the formulation of the natural law to which Saint Thomas Aquinas dedicated so much of his work, constitute the formal framework of our philosophical analysis. When all of this is brought together, the end product that the reader receives is a clear and sophisticated investigation of a specific topic in economic analysis that will serve both as an instructional tool and a reference source that is at the borderlines of economics and Christian social thought.

Our plan for 2002 is to treat the relations between the State, on the one hand, and the individual and other private institutions, on the other hand. When we first conceived of this general subject, we realized that the number of individual economic issues to which we could dedicate each volume is monumental. The criterion that we employed for selecting the three economic issues that will appear in the subsequent essays in 2002, is the present-day experience of humanity. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, led us to devote the second essay of this year’s series to the topic of immigration. The general fear at the beginning of 2002 of a serious economic recession and potentially high unemployment led us to confront the question of labor unions, to which we shall dedicate the third essay of this year’s series. Finally, the bankruptcy of Enron and its possible governmental connection led to us to consider the topic of institutional corruption. The recent political developments in Argentina, too, provide a robust model with which to examine this topic. We shall thus examine institutional corruption in our fourth and last essay this year.

We dedicated this first essay of 2002 to justice, since it presents itself as the unifying thread across the moral fabric of the other three topics. Fundamentally, justice concerns external relations between persons and the common good. The proper assignment of responsibility for bringing about the common good is made explicit by the principle of subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity and justice together, then, have a role in every aspect of material interactions of political and economic nature between persons. From this light, we can appreciate the ground that justice—hand in hand with the principle of subsidiarity—lays out for our subsequent topics in immigration, labor unions, and institutional corruption.

As a final note, I am pleased to present this year’s Christian Social Thought Series with the new design that we, at the Acton Institute, have chosen for this series. The new